Trump Urges Garland to Block Release of Jack Smith's Final Report - A Presidential Drama Unfolds
Donald Trump and two of his allies are making a last-minute push to block special counsel Jack Smith from issuing his final report on his two dismissed criminal cases against the president-elect.
Trump’s lawyers wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday, urging him not to release Smith’s report — a two-volume document that they were allowed to review in Smith’s office over the past three days.
Political Pressure and Legal Maneuvers
At the same time, two of Trump’s former co-defendants asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to block the Justice Department from releasing any report from the special counsel on the criminal case in Florida where Trump was charged with conspiring to retain a trove of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.
In the letter to Garland, Trump’s attorneys said that releasing a public narrative of the evidence Smith gathered — in the classified documents case as well as the federal election conspiracy case over Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election — would illegally interfere with the presidential transition and be little more than a political attack.
The decision about releasing Smith’s findings, they wrote, should be left to Trump’s administration.
They also called on Garland to immediately fire Smith, who is set to end his tenure by the time Trump is inaugurated.
“Because Smith has proposed an unlawful course of action, you must countermand his plan and remove him promptly,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
Spokespeople for Smith and for Garland declined to comment on the developments.
Legal Battles and Political Intrigue
Special counsels — who are appointed by attorneys general to handle politically sensitive criminal investigations — are required under Justice Department regulations to produce reports detailing their findings and charging decisions. These reports often generate enormous public interest. During Trump’s first term, for instance, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report laid out stark evidence of ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Special counsels’ reports are initially confidential, but Garland has pledged to release Smith’s report to the public in some form, following the recent tradition of attorneys general of both parties releasing them.
The letter from Trump’s lawyers to Garland provides a few clues about Smith’s conclusions: It notes that the special counsel, in describing Trump’s 2020 election subversion effort, said that Trump “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort” as “the head of the criminal conspiracies” and that he harbored a “criminal design.”
The letter was signed by four Trump lawyers, including Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, whom Trump has tapped for the No. 2 and No. 3 positions in his Justice Department.
They swiped at Smith for including in his report “attacks on other anticipated members of President Trump’s incoming administration.” And they indicated the special counsel’s report criticizes the social media company X for resisting prosecutors’ effort to obtain data from Trump’s account.
According to the letter and a legal filing by the two remaining defendants in the classified documents case, lawyers for Trump and those defendants were permitted to review a draft of the report in recent days in what they described as an unreasonably rushed and limited process. However, they said they saw enough to blast Smith’s report as “one-sided” and “slanted.”
The letter to Garland was revealed as an attachment to a motion filed Monday night by Trump’s former co-defendants: Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, two Trump aides who were accused of helping him obstruct the federal government’s investigation into the classified documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has used political funds he controls to pay for the legal defenses of both men, and Trump has tapped Nauta’s lead attorney, Stan Woodward, to be an assistant to the president and senior White House counselor in the next administration.
The new “emergency motion” asks Cannon to order the Justice Department not to release any report from Smith on the documents case. Cannon is a Trump appointee who was assigned to handle that case and frequently clashed with Smith’s team before she dismissed the charges in July.
Lawyers for Nauta and de Oliveira argued that the release of the report would violate their clients’ rights, since prosecutors are still pursuing an appeal to reinstate charges against the two men.
If Cannon sides with Nauta and de Oliveira, she would deliver one last blow to the departing special counsel, by preventing him from laying out the incriminating evidence he amassed in a narrative form just days before Trump returns to the White House.
It’s unclear, however, if Cannon has the authority to rule on Nauta and de Oliveira’s request. After she dismissed the case — ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional — the Justice Department appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, not Cannon, currently has control of the case.
